Magic is a human invention. In my opinion magic is a metaphor for human potential, good and ill. It’s written into folklore, fairy-tale and myth, and appears in every human culture, sometimes with a religious aspect and sometimes as a form of entertainment. Magic is the act of fooling apperception by deceiving the natural senses. It’s not possible to turn a rabbit into a dove, but creating the illusion that it is possible raises doubt in the mind of an audient. In the modern world we want to know ‘how it’s done’, because we know an illusion is deceitful. In medieval times the practice of magic – manipulating the known laws of nature – was ironically used to create an illusion of witchcraft. Witchfinders themselves were the real magicians here as they deceived whole nations into believing that women, especially those women who distanced themselves from the religious or patriarchal status quo – the unmarried herbalists and animal lovers, for example – were an existential threat to the church and the community. The witchfinder found ways to connect these women to local tragedies, and it was therefore easy to punish them. And they were punished very harshly. The message was: conform to expectation; do not live in isolation or by your own rules, especially if you’re a woman. The whole charade was a performance, including the final execution of the accused.
There was no physical evidence presented at these trials. There can be no physical evidence against the practice of witchcraft because the things that “witches” are accused of are impossible. This was known at the time, and even spoken about by politicians. But knowledge is always tempered by belief. The controlling grip of a church and a religion, combined with minimal scientific knowledge and a lack of education among the masses, meant that cultural apperception was broadly receptive to the supernatural.
It was less receptive, it seems, to physical fact.
The realm of apperception is sometimes confused with perception itself. A commonly quoted example of their differentiation, refers to a rich person and a poor person out walking together. They find a ten pound note lying on the ground. Simultaneously they see it. Their perception of the event is identical, but their apperception is different, uniquely defined by their financial circumstances.
Apperception is an archive of cultural information situated between the conscious and the subconscious areas of the mind. The curation of this archive is something of a mystery. Everything perceived goes into it, becoming language as it does so. Memories come out of it at will, or at odd moments unexpectedly; a song might rise into consciousness for no apparent reason – sometimes it makes sense and sometimes it seems useless or annoying. Apperception is a semi-rational system, seemingly, part mechanistic, part purposeful.
Belief is tied to the apperceived experience (the combinations of ideas accumulated), which is itself induced by perceived experience (the combinations of phenomena felt). One builds a resilience to the world of phenomena with a private world of ideas. Gradually, or quickly, these ideas ferment into a philosophy for explaining or transforming the experience of the world around us. And it need not remain private because the same body, which is used to perceive phenomena, can also be used to present phenomena (information, as we call the idea of translated, or received, sensation). Nietzsche wrote that “inertia of the spirit” causes opinions (“grow[n] out of passions”) to “stiffen into convictions.” Through degrees of ecstasy and agony, attraction and repulsion, we learn to love and loathe aspects of our interaction with the universe. These “passions” become immovable objects in the realm of apperception, causing obduracy, a rigid stubbornness. Homo sapiens suffers with “inertia of the spirit” to a great extent. It is hard to shift Belief from our consciousness, or even revise it.
Every event has its context, and context occurs in the venue-space of the mind – the environment of apperception. The mind-venue is a temple to Belief. Thoughts and emotions interfere with phenomena, trapped inside the body. There is no room for mystery, nor chaos, in human consciousness – everything has to be explained. There has to be a story, a pattern, a thread through all that we do, so when we engage with culture, we engage with belief. Simply put, when we are at home in a culture, usually in our own culture, every symbol is deciphered at subconscious level, without a fuss. Apperception provides us with the material for an organised world-view. It’s a composition, a collaboration between ourselves and the world, which is interpreted as meaning.
It’s almost too easy for a population to be controlled via the manipulation of apperception. The phenomenal power of the witchfinder was such that he (and they were always men) was often able to draw a confession from the accused. He could persuade a woman that she was a witch because, he said, the crimes were committed psychically, and not physically, by the body. He said that a bad thought from one of these women was enough to cause death or illness in the community. He said the woman could transform, even as she slept, into a bat or a cat, and commune with Satan. She could send rain or drought by thought alone. There could be no defence, and many women were made to believe they actually were witches by techniques of persuasion. They were convinced of it. It wasn’t really their fault, they were assured. The devil had control of them. They could admit it and be executed. Or they could just be executed.
The interesting irony in the history of witchcraft and witch-hunting is this lack of physical evidence. The absence of actual phenomena. Every single case brought against the thousands of women who were universally found to be guilty and then horrifically and ritualistically murdered in public, was made using the most magical and effective symbol ever created. The word.
Knowledge is indeed power. And although survival-related knowledge of nature, ways of being and acting in the world, can be passed through generations by gesture, physical example and behaviour, the human race would be nothing without its words. Written, published and spoken knowledge creates hierarchies in society. The anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss said that a “culture is a system of symbolic communication”. If you understand and know how to wield the symbols which are important to a community, you can enter that community as a stranger and quickly gain the respect of the locals. You can lead them. Language is of course at the top of that list. Words really are magic spells. You can get anything done by using words, and you can get anyone to do it if you’ve set the stage for the illusion and you present the symbols appropriately.
We are spellbound because words have greater meaning for us than phenomena, even though words may be fallacious or deliberately deceitful. We are spellbound because even physical things have become symbols for something other than what they actually are – they have meaning beyond phenomenal experience. We are spellbound because the environment represents a resource to be utilised by us rather than a physical place within which we might cooperate. We are spellbound because culture (the combination of symbols) has meaning which is greater than phenomena.
Some people have more respect for a flag than they do for other forms of life, including other people.
Until, that is, a phenomenon appears so effectively and aggressively in the form of catastrophe, agony, illness; or beauty, ecstasy, and wonderment. In that case the illusion created by spellbinding becomes shattered. The impact of phenomena which forces us to reassess our worldview is known as disbelief.
Even so, someone like a witchfinder is always on hand to attribute natural disasters to the thoughts of an isolated spinster. And this talent has not disappeared with the witchfinder. It has become more refined.
Tune in next week to discover how disbelief is in danger of annihilation!